


the rain runner

by ninemoons42



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Criminals, Alternate Universe - Dark, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Dark Past, Escape, Familiar Characters in Different Roles, Forced to kill, Gen, Girls with Guns, On the Run, Organized Crime, Past Abuse, Past Torture, The Man Who Knows Too Much, Unlikely Rescuer
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-12
Updated: 2013-10-12
Packaged: 2017-12-29 05:47:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,574
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1001726
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninemoons42/pseuds/ninemoons42
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Raleigh Becket is fleeing the man he's become since he was forced to join Hannibal Chau's organization - and the running throws him right into the path of a woman calling herself Mori, who is carrying far too many guns and doesn't need them to be a weapon.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the rain runner

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tielan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tielan/gifts).



> Warnings for graphic depictions of violence, as would appear in a world dominated by shadowy criminal organizations. Therefore, there are references to torture, assault and battery, and gratuitous murder. This story is mainly written from the point of view of a person who's been physically and mentally abused.

title: the rain runner  
Written for Round One of the [Pacific Rim Mini Bang](http://pr-minibang.tumblr.com/)  
author: [](http://ilovetakahana.livejournal.com/profile)[**ilovetakahana**](http://ilovetakahana.livejournal.com/) / [](http://ninemoons42.dreamwidth.org/profile)[](http://ninemoons42.dreamwidth.org/)**ninemoons42**  
artist: [Tielan](http://tielan.tumblr.com/) | [Link to Graphic](http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7338/10231753526_a23ee385ea.jpg)  
beta: [](http://afrocurl.livejournal.com/profile)[](http://afrocurl.livejournal.com/)**afrocurl**  
rating: R  
warnings: as above in Notes

Rainfall ripples on the sidewalk. Bursts of color, of light, of noise, as he scrambled past open doors and men in battered jackets. 

He ran, and the pavement was rough and uneven beneath his feet. Pockmarked, sloping up and down, but this was his every day, his every night. Running, and the slap of his soles. Splashing through shallow pools of water and remembering not to trip over coiled cables or garbage bags. Water caught in his hair and flowed down his cheeks in cold trails, dripped ice into the shapeless collar of his worn shirt. 

The night was full of raucous sound, but all he was aware of were the last things he heard: someone whispering his name, and someone cocking a pistol. Soft iron whispering against oiled leather. Slivers of light glittering off gaudy and greening gold.

The guns and the knives were out, and they were out for him.

He didn’t waste time thinking. He didn’t spare a moment to go home and find his bug-out bag. It was too late for that. 

His wits were all he had left, now, and the memories burned into his mind. Creased paper, wrinkled, smelling like cheap wine and spilled beer. Not enough to wash away the ink, the writing, the plain truth.

Names. There had been so many names. Every one of them was in his head, now. Men and women, and even children. Fifty in the past two years alone. And what about the rest? There had to be others. There had to be so many more. What he was fighting - no, not fighting, he was too alone to fight. What he was running away from had not been born yesterday. It was old enough to have thrown off tributaries. It was a terrifying hydra, and he thought he could remember reading about many-headed monsters, about how impossible they were to kill.

Pain, slashing a bright red line into his side. He stumbled, caught himself. One hand on the pavement, coming away gritty and wet, slick with unknown and unknowable things. He didn’t stop; he couldn’t stop. Back on his feet, shaking. Running, breathless, blind - the neon lights above him went out with a loud crack, an explosion of sparks, a shocked cry, quickly cut off.

The second collision with the sidewalk left him dazed. Everything was spinning around him. He had to bite his tongue, hard, against the sudden urge to empty his stomach into the gutter.

If only he could empty his mind, too. If only he could forget what he now knew. The names coiled inside him, barbed: they were the goad and the spur and the lash. They hammered at him, even now; they wouldn’t let him draw a clean breath.

Too much knowledge.

There was a voice, too near. Not quite shouting, but he cringed, tried to huddle in on himself. He wrapped his arms around his chest, his middle, as if he could protect himself from blows or bullets.

But there was no menace in the words that he could hear.

“Are you okay?”

He couldn’t remember the last time anyone had been concerned for him. There was no room for concern in the people he’d been with, in the places they’d frequented. Dead eyes, hard fists. When you became a liability, you were left behind, your life bleeding away in streams and puddles of red, and that was that. 

“I need you to answer me truthfully: are you okay?” A human voice, low and urgent and sweet. “Do you need medical help?”

He answered, as if compelled. “I need to get away. I need to be gone. I don’t want to die.”

The pause that followed clawed at him, left him feeling colder and colder with every passing moment. Time was trickling inexorably through his fingers. He didn’t have time, and he didn’t have anywhere to go.

He pushed himself to his feet again. The pain in his side flared up, and with it, his fear. A fist around his heart, constricting. 

Running. He had to keep running. He could never stop running.

He looked around, wary. Every shadow that moved was a threat.

Even the woman in the leather jacket, who frowned, then tipped her chin back so she could squint up at him. She was holding an umbrella over his head. There wasn’t enough light for him to make out the rest of her features. She was a full head shorter than he was; her mouth was set in a thin, determined line; there were four shiny parallel lines cutting down her left cheek.

As he watched, she stepped back from him. He could see her holding her free hand away from her side, palm forward: empty. He could see the relaxed lines of her shoulders. He could see her boots, scratched up and scuffed, but small, and seemingly sturdy.

“I don’t mean you any harm,” the woman said.

“Go away,” he said.

“If you are alone, here,” she said, “you will certainly die. Is this what you want?”

He was shivering again. The rain continued to pour down; it beat a rapid tattoo upon her umbrella, but he could hear her perfectly.

He shook his head.

“Then come with me,” the woman in the leather jacket said.

She turned on her heel, swift and sharp movement, leaving him standing in the rain once again.

She didn’t walk or stroll or saunter down the street: she marched. One step after another, an unerring and unbroken straight line.

Hurrying to keep up with her, he could see that people got out of her way as rapidly as they could: it was either that or she’d run them down, push past them, unstoppable, inexorable.

A left turn, followed by another left. She stopped at the foot of a rusting staircase that hugged the wall of an aging brick building. She held a hand out at shoulder height; the rain had stopped falling. He watched her close her umbrella: brisk, clipped, no wasted movement in arm or wrist. “This way,” she said.

Booted or not, now she stepped silently, heading upwards, while the steps creaked and protested beneath his weight. He kept looking over his shoulder; she kept her eyes straight ahead, until there was no more staircase, just an open door and a right turn into a cramped corridor.

Sagging floor, piles of refuse in the corners; broken lightbulbs hanging by wires from blackened sockets. 

“Where are we?” he whispered, eventually, despite himself.

“We’re here,” the woman said. Scritch-scratch, metal against metal, the click and creak of a lock being worked open.

Outside the wallpaper was scored and falling down in great chunks; the corridor smelled like rats and spoiled food and burnt metal; the wind whistled through every crack and every window, driving rain and rot into the building.

Inside the room that the woman had unlocked, it was an entirely different story.

It was actually warm in here, and dry. When she closed the door behind him it didn’t feel like someone was locking and barring the doors of a cage shut. Bright lights overhead, warm glow revealing every surface. Spotless counters. There were a few cartons of takeout food next to the sink, empty, neatly stacked. A trio of candles in mismatched holders atop the refrigerator, which hummed contentedly and steadily to itself. 

The woman walked to the small square table and dropped into one of the chairs, and the wood creaked, brief complaint. “I don’t mean you any harm,” she said again.

He looked back at her. Now that there was enough light to see her by, he couldn’t stop cataloging the details of her, trying to find out why he’d followed her in the first place. Almond-shaped eyes; dark brown irises. Her eyebrows were raised, and her eyes were wide open. 

Straight black hair, clipped right at chin level; fringe, almost hanging into her eyes. Vivid blue streaks framing her cheeks; blue seemed to be a favored color, as he could also see it in her eyeliner and in her lipstick.

There were too many angles in her face, too many rough spots to go with the scars, with the hands that she put on the table, that looked like they had been battered and broken.

She was almost, almost beautiful. There were deep lines radiating from the outer corners of her eyes; there were hard curves that seemed to pull down the corners of her mouth.

He opened his mouth, closed it, stepped back towards the door. “I - ” he began. “What do you want from me? Why did you bring me here?”

“I brought you here because you looked like you needed a safe place to stay,” she said. “This place is safe, or at least it is as safe as I can make it.”

“How can you make this place safe?” he asked.

Instead of answering, she shrugged off her leather jacket.

More scars silvering the skin of her bared arms. Now he could see that she was wearing a dark t-shirt with the sleeves roughly chopped off.

Most of his attention, however, was focused on the rig she was wearing on her shoulders, straps looping around the upper half of her torso: leather and ballistic nylon, shiny black against the faded dark gray of her shirt. A pistol tucked snugly against her ribs on the right side; a pair of extra magazines on the left.

“Who are you?” he asked, blinking, trying to see her with the gun in her hands, and failing. She didn’t seem to need any weapons. She looked like she could kill with nothing but her bare hands, and perhaps a hard-booted kick or two.

“Call me Mori,” the woman said as she settled more comfortably into her chair. “And you are?”

He answered her question with a question of his own: “Are you a cop, Mori?” 

He should be running. He should be afraid. But he still felt like he had to trust her: she still looked concerned, even when he could see that there were too many hard lines in her face.

He sagged back against the door. He couldn’t hold himself up any more.

Mori stayed at the table, her dark eyes pinning him in place. “You can sit down here, if you’d rather be civilized.”

“I can’t move,” he said.

“You look like death warmed over, plus adrenaline crash. Not a good combination. I speak from personal experience.”

“I feel like I could die at any moment.”

Again that raised eyebrow. “Tell me why. And tell me your name. _A_ name. I have to call you something.”

The words were out of his mouth before he could think them through: “I’m Yance.”

He’d had family, once, a long time ago. He’d had a mother who’d urged him to drink his milk, and a father who’d read to him, anything they could get their hands on, mostly newspapers and the occasional tattered book.

He’d had a brother, or he had hazy memories of having a brother, who’d taught him how to ride a bicycle - but that brother had gone away and he hadn’t heard from him since, and his brother’s name might have been Yancy.

Maybe Yancy was dead, and maybe he was alive, somewhere. Maybe Yancy was safe and sound, raising hell or raising a family. The only thing that was true was that Yancy was not in this hellhole, and he was not carrying fifty names - fifty deaths - around in his head.

“All right, Yance,” Mori said. “Good to meet you, I suppose. Will you tell me what’s going on?”

“Why do you want to know? You didn’t answer my question. Are you a cop? Law enforcement of some kind?”

“I...am aware of what is going on in this part of the city,” she said, slowly, carefully. He could see her thinking about the words that she was using. “And I want to do something about it.”

He surprised himself, then, when he laughed. It was a bitter sound, cracked and riven, short and harsh. “You want to do something about it,” he said, and let himself half-fall, half-slide to the floor at last. “Tell me, Mori, do you know what _it_ actually is? The things that go on here? The people who hold this place, who have the power of life and death over everyone else who’s unlucky enough to find themselves here?”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “You’re talking about the Chau family and its people. Its - hm - enterprises.”

Images flashed through his head: himself, huddled at the foot of a locked door, clothes ripped away, cold steel against his skin and the sharp kiss of a fine blade. Three identical smiles distorted into demonic expressions in the wash of a thousand colors of neon light. A woman with blood on her fists, red against her skin and against the steel ringing her knuckles. A man calmly running a fine-toothed pocket comb through his hair, even as he kicked the body already limp at his feet, over and over again.

He bit his tongue against the laugh that was threatening to claw its way out: worse than the last, more bitter, far darker. “Enterprises,” he said, drawing the word out. He wanted to spit, wanted to throw up, wanted to scream. Too much horror, too much death. “What a clean little word you have there. Like it was that easy. Like you could really beat them.”

Mori narrowed her eyes.

He kept going, he kept talking: he had to find an outlet, or he would suffocate, right here and right now. 

“This place is the underbelly of this city,” he said, slurring the words in his hurry. “This place is no place for people. No, not for people at all. What lives here? Not people. Monsters shaped like people. No humanity. No remorse. No compassion. Maybe they were people before they came here. This place kills people. Puts monsters into human shapes.”

“So are you a monster?” Mori asked. 

He repeated the question: “Am I a monster?” He began to shiver again. It was worse this time. “I don’t know. I think I’m still - still me. I don’t want to become like them, but - ” He closed his eyes, but he could still see the list, and worse.

He could see his own hand on a gun: either he would kill with it or be killed with it. He could see the man tied into the chair a few feet away: the tattered and bloodied sleeves, the layers upon layers of bruises, the struggle between absolute fear and a final, stoic composure.

He could hear the woman with the knuckledusters, her sweet taunting voice. “You kill him or we kill you, your choice: all we care about is that someone dies tonight. Death makes dinner taste better, you see. You want to work with Chau? You want to live? You want to eat? You want a roof over your head? Simple really. _Kill him._ Don’t hesitate. You have a gun. He is unarmed.” On and on, wearing at him.

He could remember the constant hunger that gnawed at him, the fever that raged beneath his skin. Exposure of a different kind: inadequate food, little sleep. There was no way that he could recover from these things on his own, and the fact that the woman and her companions had been forcing him to drink all kinds of firewater, bitter and burning in his throat, could only make things worse and worse still.

He could remember that beyond the man in the chair was a round table, a dozen chairs, a cluster of dishes, savory steam on the air.

Now: hands around his wrists, a quiet grunt, and he was being hauled to his feet. Mori, it was only Mori, he realized, when he opened his eyes. He couldn’t remember closing them. She was strong, he thought, faintly, as she led him to the table and pushed him down into the other chair by his shoulders.

As soon as he sat down he could feel what little strength he had ebb away, and slowly he slumped over. The wood of the table was cool to his forehead. He could hear Mori moving around him. Again, it wasn’t her feet - her boots - making noise. It was everything else: the rattle of moving crockery, the pop of a container being opened. Metal against glass, the thump of a fire coming to life.

It all sounded so good to him. So normal, and so strange at the same time. It was almost enough to block out the memory of his shaking hands, the wavering muzzle, the way the man in the chair sighed and almost calmly closed his eyes. The last instance of breathless silence, before the kick and the cordite - 

“Yance,” said a voice. Mori’s voice.

His head felt heavy as he tried to wrap his fingertips around the cup she put before him. Plain pale porcelain, almost gleaming in the overhead lights. Rich red-brown liquid, heat washing off it in nearly visible waves, fragrant like rain on grass, something that he could almost remember from his childhood.

“Drink slowly,” Mori said as she sat back down. 

She drank her tea in delicate, quick sips, and he tried to do the same - but it had cooled to just the right temperature, and as he filled his mouth with that heat it was as if he wanted more, more, couldn’t get enough of that soothing sensation.

He finished the cup, and swallowed. Sweet lingering spice on the tip of his tongue. He said, “Could I have some more?”

She indicated the pot next to the stove with a tilt of her head.

He poured his cup half-full. 

“If you want to continue your tale, you may,” Mori said, emptying the pot into her cup. 

“I don’t want to remember it now,” he said.

“All right. Do you want to rest? You can sleep on the couch if you like. I will watch through the night. I will make sure that no harm comes to you.”

“That gun of yours,” he said, “won’t be enough to protect you from them.”

She smiled, then, and it was just a brief flash of teeth, there and gone. Like a glimpse of a weapon. “And what makes you think that I have only one gun?”

He watched, wary and wide-eyed, as she got to her feet and padded past. She disappeared around a corner, and he could hear sounds like things being opened and closed. 

When she came back she was carrying a pump-action shotgun: and he couldn’t help but stare at the muscles in her arms, wiry against the polished wood and the gleaming metal. “Go and lie down before you fall down,” she said as she settled back down at the table, as she began to take shells out of her pockets. “Go to sleep. I’ve got this. There’s a blanket on the couch.”

He got up, followed the direction she pointed him in. His muscles were leaden and heavy as he struggled out of his outer layers. His sweater was unraveling in several places, but it could still keep him warm. He folded his grimy cuffs back, gracelessly. He pulled the sagging collar up around his ears, wrapped the blanket around his shoulders, and fell onto the couch.

Squeaking springs. Worn cushion beneath his cheek.

The last thought that cycled through his mind was this:

_I am Raleigh Becket and Hannibal Chau wants me dead and I don’t know what to do, except answer to the name “Yance”._

***

He was alone when he woke up.

There was a note on the table.

Angular letters, evenly spaced. The last sentence was underlined three times.

_Back in two hours. Food is in the fridge. Eat something. You need to be able to focus, because I will be asking you questions. DO NOT LEAVE THE APARTMENT._

The refrigerator was mostly empty, except for the two plastic containers on one of the lower shelves. One was filled with fried rice, the other with about a dozen small pale ivory buns.

There was a battered thermos on the table: more tea. The earthy scent of it went well with the buns, which were stuffed with sweet bean paste. He finished off five: they were a pleasantly heavy weight on his stomach, soft bland bread and something very much like toffee, like grainy gritty fudge. He put the container back where he found it.

He poured himself a little more tea before getting to his feet and looking around the tiny apartment: there was nothing on the walls. No photos, no paintings, where most little rooms in this district had some kind of scroll in the corner, a trite line about blessings or good luck, sloppy brushwork.

Near the couch there was a series of sagging shelves: the top ones were empty except for a thin coating of dust, no cobwebs. Black cases arranged on and below the lowest layers, all locked. Some of them were almost familiar: just the right size and shape to hold a gun and its accessories and a decent amount of ammo. Some were too compacted, too flat, and he wondered what else might be in Mori’s arsenal. The largest of the boxes was the likely resting place of her shotgun.

Reluctantly, he tore himself away from that corner, his eyes falling onto his blanket, still creased from his restless night. Thin white lines on dark blue fabric, a pattern like flowers with dozens of teardrop-shaped petals. There were places where the cloth had been carefully mended and, in one corner, patched with a square of plain light green.

He tried to fold the blanket back into some semblance of order, but as he tried to stretch out his arms to span the full length of the material he couldn’t help but hiss in shock: an almost familiar pain had him in its grip. Now that pain was centered on his left shoulder blade, burning in his nerves even after he’d dropped the blanket in his dismay.

He fell to his knees next to the couch and fought to catch his breath. Deep, heaving gasps. He could breathe, but he couldn’t move. He closed his eyes, and tears squeezed out onto his cheeks. He clenched his hands into fists. 

“Yance,” Mori said, and there was a sound of the door being slammed and hastily locked when she called him again. “Yance!”

Things falling down around him with quiet thumps. Something black and shiny on the couch: Mori’s pistol, in a holster, with the muzzle pointed away from him. 

She was moving nearby, picking up one of the black boxes, then coming back to him. Eyebrows in a straight line, mouth pinched. “Where does it hurt?” she asked him, low and quiet and urgent.

He indicated his left side. “My ribs, last night; now my shoulder blade.”

She made a tsking sound, shook her head. Her hands were moving on the black box next to her, and she flipped the lid off to reveal an overstocked first-aid kit: bandages and dressings, various containers for medicines and other useful items. 

He watched her pause over the shears in their plastic sleeve, and then she said, “You’re going to have to take your shirt off. I need to look at your injury. Can you raise your hands over your head?”

He grabbed the hems of his sweater, took a deep breath, yanked it off. The movement made the pain flare up. He had to choke back a cry, and then a series of dry heaves. “I - I can’t do that again,” he said.

“Well, you’ll still be able to use that sweater after this. Hold still,” she said, as she gently pushed him down to the floor, so that he was lying on his stomach. She held the shears in front of his face. “I’ll cut your clothes off, okay? It’s just me. Don’t fight me.”

He could feel the shape of the shears as it moved up his skin, up his spinal column, and he could feel his shirts falling away neatly on either side. Two layers of thin cotton, grimy, more gray than white, stained with his sweat.

He heard her hiss softly through her teeth. “What?” he asked. “What’s wrong?”

“It’s a wonder you can still move around,” Mori said, cold and neutral. “Are you having problems breathing?”

“No. What’s going on?”

“You’re bruised up and down your left side,” she said. “Some swelling around your ribs. I can see overlapping colors.”

He closed his eyes against the brief description. Again a flash of the list, the fifty names.

Someone knocked on the door.

He didn’t have to be looking at Mori to know that she’d frozen in place. 

He was paralyzed, defenseless. He was shirtless, on an unfamiliar floor.

“Stay here,” Mori hissed. Now her hands were binding him up, wrapping bandages around his torso, quick and precise movements. He could feel the hot rush of her breath, very close to his ear.

“Are we in trouble?” he asked. “I need my sweater back.”

She dropped the material on his head. “Don’t make a sound,” she said.

As he struggled to put his sweater back on - biting deeply into his lip to stop himself from groaning in pain - he saw her pick up her gun. A rapidfire flick of her hand freed it from its holster.

He watched her move toward the door and take up a position where it would serve as a makeshift shield.

The knock came again, and this time there were words to go with it. “Open up, please.”

Mori cleared her throat, and said, calmly and politely, “Is there a problem, officer?”

“We’re not the police, ma’am, just people trying to do our jobs. We’re looking for someone and we’ve been told that the person we’re looking for is at this address. Have you had a break-in?”

“No.”

“Anyone else in there with you?”

“I live alone.” 

He could see that the knuckles of her left hand were slowly growing whiter and whiter, pale against the dead black of her gun.

“We really need to make sure, ma’am.”

“I’m absolutely sure I’m alone,” Mori said.

A brief silence. 

He wasn’t familiar with the voices, but he was familiar with the tension in them, the casual insistence. The assumption of power.

Anyone else would have given him up, and he would have understood that they would do it in order to live another day, survive another day.

“Ma’am.” A different voice. Not so friendly any more. “Please let us in.”

He got to his feet, silently, though it was a near thing: the pain almost forced him back down to his knees, and it was only by leaning heavily on the couch that he could keep upright.

A complicated series of expressions crossed Mori’s face. From a glare to a frown to a wince, finally settling on the same determined mask he’d seen on her, out on the street, in the middle of the pouring rain.

Her mouth moved, shaping a word.

_“Catch.”_

She threw the gun at him and he fumbled it out of the air, scrabbling, clumsily, to check the magazine and the safety, to get it ready to shoot.

He knew what it was like to hold a gun with hands that trembled: he couldn’t properly focus on the door, or on Mori’s hand as she threw the locks open.

Finger on the trigger, his whole hand shaking, as the door began to swing inward. He’d seen the face before: this man often drove for the woman with the knuckledusters.

And then Mori _exploded_ into movement: she hit the man hard, with an open palm and a clenched fist and the toe of her boot. She hit the man quickly, so quickly that there was no time to draw breath or to cry out.

Hard on the heels of the first man was the second: older, grizzled. This one was carrying a machine pistol - he was bringing it up to bear on Mori, he had its muzzle practically in her face - 

Adrenaline crashed through him once again and the gun trembled, wavered - went still.

Just as he was pointing it at the grizzled man’s center of mass.

He fired, twice - then moved the gun up a little. The third bullet caught the man squarely in the face, just below his right cheek. Blood and brains and bits of bone spraying into the corridor beyond.

Mori stuck her head out the door; he could see her look to the left and look to the right, checking the perimeter. When she came back in, she said, “Clear.”

He walked to the kitchen table on knees that were none too steady. He safetied the gun, put it down, and collapsed into the nearest chair, breathing hard against the pain, against the rush.

Mori picked up the gun, ejected the round in the chamber and the entire magazine, and then clubbed the unconscious man in the face with it.

He watched her rifle the man’s pockets, watched the grim satisfaction settle in her eyes as she found the combat knife strapped to his ankle. She tilted the blade into the light, muttered something, then rammed it into the man’s already bruised throat. 

She kicked and rolled him out into the corridor to join his comrade.

“Trouble, then,” she said when she came back in. Her gun was tucked into her waistband.

“A lot of it,” he said. “What was wrong with the knife?”

That won him a laugh: muffled, brief. “Too dull. Or sharpened by an idiot.”

He tried to smile, tried to appreciate the clumsy attempt at humor.

It didn’t seem to matter to her. She shrugged, and retrieved her kettle. “Tea first, and I’ll pack, and we’ll run.”

He stared at her. “We?”

Rush of flowing water, screech of movement through pipes. “We,” she repeated, simply. “You can’t possibly think I’d abandon you to them.”

“If you did that,” he pointed out, as reasonably as he was decidedly not feeling, “then your life would be so much easier. They won’t be looking for you. It’s me they want.”

“And I am interested in keeping you alive,” Mori said, folding her arms across her chest as she leaned on the counter next to the stove. 

When the water boiled, she scalded the teapot and the two cups, spooned tea into the pot, and poured in the hot water. “Count to a hundred, then pour,” she said, before walking out of the kitchen.

He was a quarter of the way through his tea when she came back and dropped a bulging duffel bag next to his chair. 

He watched her finish half her mug in the first gulp, and after she took a deep breath and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, he asked, “What’s in the backpack?”

“Things that will help me keep you alive,” she said as she passed his jacket back to him, and rolled her shoulders back and forth. 

Mori put all the tea things into the sink and ran water over them, then walked to the door. “Come on. Time to go.”

He didn’t spare a glance for the bodies they left behind.

He kept his eyes on Mori’s back as she led him down another set of staircases, to the ground floor, out a door, onto a battered motorbike. The relative hush of the night shattered by the deep, full-throated roar of its engine.

He kept his eyes on Mori’s hands as she kept a tight grip on the controls. The same hands that had held an umbrella over his head, that had offered him tea, that had cut his shirts away.

There was no way of knowing whether he was heading somewhere safe: on the one hand, he was known to the Chau family, and they never let anyone go. There were fifty names in his head to prove that particular point, and that wasn’t counting the many, many unfortunate faces, killed on a whim, killed as the prelude to dinner. 

That wasn’t counting the two who were dead by his own hand - dead because it was either him or them and he was a coward who wanted to live, though he didn’t deserve to.

On the other hand: who was Mori, and what did she want? More specifically, what did she want from him? There had to be a reason why she wanted to stop the unstoppable. What was her angle? Maybe they did something to her, to her family - maybe that could explain the winter in her eyes.

The motorcycle roared on, heedless of the weather, heedless of red lights, and there was nothing for him to do but think, when there was nothing left to think about.

What little life he had left, he’d placed in Mori’s hands: she was all he had and all he knew, now. Mori had hauled him to his feet and Mori was asking him to live, to help.

He held on, and closed his eyes, and didn’t know where he’d been and where he was going.

END

**Author's Note:**

> Huge thanks to Tielan for creating such a lovely and evocative graphic for this story, and many thanks to Afrocurl for looking the words over.


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